All That Mullarkey (12 page)

The heat from his hand beat through the fabric of her trousers. She succeeded, second go, in starting the car. His eyes were on her face in the evening shadows and she willed her features into nonchalance. ‘You’re not still panicking about that, are you?’ She smiled her most brilliant smile, then ended, teasingly, ‘Clear off. Time I was going.’

When Cleo got home, Gav was lying full length on the sofa just
as she’d imagined. He folded the paper onto the floor. ‘OK?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘What happened?’ Hands linked behind his head, he watched her.

‘What?’ She shrugged out of her jacket, smothering a yawn. Suddenly she was shattered.

‘The football. I thought you were coming to watch?’

Oops.

‘Rhianne and Dora were there.’

Her life had been happening, she hadn’t had time to think about his. ‘Had I promised to be there? Somebody suggested a drink, so I went.’ She hung her jacket up, kicked off her shoes and dropped into an armchair.

‘I just thought you’d be there.’

‘You could have asked me. Instead of just thinking.’ She hadn’t meant to be confrontational but he made her feel so defensive. So she added, lightly, ‘Sorry if you were disappointed.’ Slowly, still yawning, she walked upstairs.

The package was still hidden in her knickers drawer under tossed cotton, lace and satin; white mainly, some black. Three pairs of French she didn’t like much, but Gav did, sundry sexy wisps, two pairs of iron knickers for tight dresses. And for trousers that showed visible pantie line, thongs. Gav liked those, too. But Gav would never look in her knickers drawer; only knickers there, not very neat, and her mobile phone charger.

And this, her secret. She slipped the package out. Reread the instructions, tapping her thumbnail against her teeth, her stomach see-sawing.

Then, suddenly, Gav was in the doorway. ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’

Shoving the package away, she pounced on the tangled charger flex and began to wind the wire neatly. ‘You made me jump!’

‘So who was it tonight, did you go somewhere nice?’

She pushed aside the fact that she knew he’d object if he knew that her companion had been a man, and focused instead on her growing irritation. ‘Why are my movements an issue now? Why are you keeping an eye on me? This never used to happen.’

Gav began to tug off his clothes, movements sharp. ‘Maybe you were less secretive then.’

‘Maybe I felt less patrolled!’

His eyes narrowed and he sat on the end of the bed. ‘It shouldn’t matter.’

‘You should trust me.’

Into bed, in silence. Cleo switched out the light. They lay, side by side but not touching. Eventually Gav said, ‘O-kay. It’s the semi-finals tomorrow night. If you’d like to come?’

Her voice was tired in the darkness. ‘Thanks. I’d like that.’ No she wouldn’t, not particularly. But she ought to go.

Chapter Thirteen

At the edge of the spectators’ balcony above the sports hall, on the wooden rail that was just right to lean on, Cleo, Keith, Dora, Ian and Rhianne lined up their forearms next to Gav’s. Kids screamed in a netted-off crèche, where poor overworked nursery nurses tried to prevent them from maiming each other with enormous sponge shapes. Eddie, in his buggy on the other side of Gav, mumbled at a rusk. Messily. Gruesomely. Long trails of beige slobber festooned his chin and cobwebbed from his pudgy, starfish hands. Hastily, Gav looked away.

Already in the neat royal blue of the Bettsbrough players, who were to meet The King’s Arms All Stars after Brecks United had slugged out the present match with the Air Training Cadets, Gav flexed his fingers and studied the opposition. Brecks were OK, a team from a local haulage concern. Big blokes, but at least halfway sensible. But the ATC? He groaned. ‘If we get through to the final, I hope the ATC don’t. They’re all so young and up for it, they just crash into every tackle as if they’re made of rubber.’

Cleo’s answering, ‘Really?’ suggested a degree of detachment.

Gav sighed, newly dejected that he was no longer selected to play forward. He’d slowed behind the pace of the ball, found the incessant beating up and down the pitch too much. There were twenty-year-olds to take his place. But his height and reach gave him good coverage of the goal, particularly with the seven-a-side, scaled-down goal.

He sipped orange juice and gloomily watched the ATC beat Brecks 2-1, no matter how loudly he roared on Brecks. ‘Bollocks,’ he sighed again, before trotting down to join his team in the warm-up.

Breathing in the rubbery smell of the sports hall, jogging floppily on the spot before the goal, he glanced up at the gallery. Instead of watching, Cleo was talking to Dora, chin on hand. About him? Last night’s squabble? Was Cleo sighing, ‘I can’t imagine what’s up with him these days’? He punched a flying ball away. What could he try next? The keeping-off-sex device was patently failing to convince. Every night, Cleo stared uncomprehendingly at his pyjamas as she climbed into bed gloriously naked and tempting.

All he could do was hug and kiss and hope desperately he could do more soon. At least she seemed prepared to accede to his temporary sex ban and didn’t initiate sex herself.

He bounced on his toes as the ref blew the whistle and The King’s Arms fell on the ball like dogs.

He thrust his palms out hopefully as the ball hurtled towards him, successfully deflecting it to one of his own players, who sent it soaring up the pitch. Bouncing on his toes, he clapped his gloved hands together gently to ease the stinging.

As soon as Gav went down to play his match, Dora sidled up and whispered to Cleo, ‘I’ve decided to leave Keith. Or almost decided. It’s just too good, the thing between Sean and me. I can’t ignore it. It’s shown up all the craters in my marriage.’

Cleo checked that Keith, several feet away, was deep in the football match, leaning over the rail and roaring Bettsbrough on. She muttered back, ‘But what about the kids?’

Dora turned a set face. ‘They stay with me.’

‘Aren’t they just as much Keith’s as yours?’ A vision of the package in her knickers drawer flashed across her mind. The father was important. Wasn’t he?

The spectators yelled as Bettsbrough fluked a goal. Dora and Cleo cried, ‘Yeah!’ exchanging obligatory triumphant grins with Ian and Keith. Rhianne was at the crèche, confronting the nursery nurse in charge, hands on skinny hips, head tossing. The nursery nurse had Roland and Will by their hands, patently wishing to pass them back. Rhianne’s body language suggested no desire to take them.

When Keith’s attention was safely back on the game, Dora growled, ‘You don’t know about motherhood! I’m the one programmed to look after the kids and I’ve always done it. Keith will be able to see them when he wants. And they’ll have Sean.’

Cleo tried to sound sympathetic. ‘But will Keith’s love for his kids just conveniently dry up and the kids transfer their affections to the incoming male? And do you tell Keith he’s got to leave the posh pad he’s slaved for, so you can move your boyfriend in? Or take the kids to live in Sean’s flat in the city centre where there’s no garden, no space and you’ll have to dry the washing on the banisters? Do you think Keith will be OK with that?’

A great groan went up as Gav let in the equaliser, retrieving the ball from the net with resigned sheepishness. King’s supporters cheered madly.

Dora massaged her temples. ‘I’m entitled to half of everything,’ she muttered uncertainly, ‘and because of the kids I think I can force Keith to move out. But it’ll be fairer if we sell the house and buy separate places.’

Cleo nodded. ‘But I’m afraid you’ve got an awful lot of shit to get through first. To front up Keith and his grief and anger.’ She felt Dora flinch. Keith had a temper and was known to clamour like a gorilla when enraged. ‘To face his pain over the children, his fury at being effectively chucked out of his home. Fight any action he brings against you –’

Dora flung herself away. ‘Oh shut up, Cleo! You don’t know a bloody thing about it.’

Cleo watched Dora stalk over to the crèche to check on Meggie. Maybe Dora was right, she didn’t know much about children and broken marriages. Though she felt she was beginning to get some idea, she thought, as everyone craned over the balcony to watch another attack on Bettsbrough’s goal, which Gav halted by catching the ball hard against his stomach and cuddling it protectively.

Cleo began to relax as they filed into the familiar brass-and-beam interior of The Three Fishes, with its ripple of conversation. She blessed Rhianne’s kind mum who had offered to have the kids for a couple of hours so the adults could have a drink and relax.

Bettsbrough had beaten The King’s Arms 3-1 and Gav seemed almost his ordinary self, easy and familiar as they ordered drinks. Cleo had just taken her Budweiser bottle from her lips to laugh at Gav’s pained recap of deflecting the ball with the ‘midriff method’, when she heard her name.

‘Hello, Cleo! I didn’t know you came in here.’

Her heart did a vertical take-off before nose diving into the pit of her stomach.

She turned slowly, aware that sentences had been suspended as everyone looked, half smiling in case it was someone they might know too.

‘Hi.’ Her mouth was dry. Her next gulp lodged as if solid in her throat. ‘I’ve never seen you in here before, either.’

Justin grimaced. ‘Bloody car’s broken down along the road. My mate, Pete, looks after it, I’m waiting for him to turn up with his magic spanners.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Shouldn’t be long, I left a message with his wife.’ He smiled and Cleo’s friends smiled back, nodded sympathetically. Then glanced at Cleo expectantly.

She took a deep breath. ‘Right … well … this is my husband, Gav, and Keith and Dora, Rhianne and Ian.’ Oh shit, shit, look at them shaking hands, nodding, murmuring. She rushed on, waving casually towards Justin. ‘I met Justin at a workshop.’

Justin, apparently blissfully at ease, leaned on a convenient wooden pillar, one of those that looked as if it’d had an axe taken to the corners. ‘Cleo put us all through hoops for a day. We thought we could communicate adequately until then – very switched-on lady.’

Rhianne gave him a coquettish smile. ‘Cleo’s very focused on her job. I’m sure you do more interesting things, outside of work. Sit down and tell us.’

‘Thanks.’ Justin dragged up a worn brown stool. ‘I do a bit of jet skiing. You ought to try it sometime, you’d love it. You need a wetsuit though. No good turning up in jeans or anything.’ He blinked innocently at Cleo.

She tried to make her eyes flinty but Justin looked supremely unmoved.

Ian butted in. ‘Can you imagine letting our two terrors lose on jet-skis? God save us.’

‘Perhaps not for young families,’ cooed Rhianne. ‘You married, Justin? Got any kids?’

Justin shook his head. ‘Haven’t tried it yet.’

Cleo, in the time it took to get her breath and steady her heart, decided that, if Justin was playing some sodding silly game of his own devising, she would play, too. And laughed. ‘Married? Well, no … Justin’s
gay
.’ She smiled her sweetest smile. ‘Where’s your partner tonight? Tucked up at home with a cookery book?’

She registered reactions around the table. Curiosity. Surprise. Justin turned to face her very slowly, eyes narrowed. Then his face grew sombre and he sighed. Massaging his temples above suddenly sorrowful eyes, he swallowed. ‘To be honest … there’s a problem. He suddenly ran out on me in favour of a previous relationship. It’s very difficult … oh, where’s the Gents?’ Head down, fingers splayed dramatically across his eyes, Justin dashed through the nearby door with a brass outline of a little man on it.

Cleo watched him go, remembering to close her mouth after a second.

A long moment of stillness, then everyone began to speak at once. ‘You said the wrong thing there, Cleo!’ Dora sounded quite censorious.

‘Is he really
gay
? What a loss to womankind.’ Rhianne clucked.

And Gav, ‘How does that come out in seminar?’

Cleo shrugged. Swallowed. ‘He’s quite open about it. “Out”, as they say.’

When Justin finally reappeared, he seemed subdued but recovered and everyone avoided any mention of his missing partner. Rhianne bickered as usual with Ian, while Keith and Dora listened, hardly a word to exchange of their own.

Cleo’s phone gave the tone that heralded a text message. She read expressionlessly then snapped her phone shut. Catching Gav’s enquiring expression, she remarked, ‘Liza wants to know if I’m going out on Friday.’

He looked dismayed. ‘Hang on, Friday’s the footie final!’

Cleo finished her drink. ‘I’ll tell her that then, won’t I?’

All the light seemed to fade from Gav’s face. ‘Yes, you’ll have to.’

Her cheeks burned and she couldn’t seem to stop herself musing, ‘
Have
to?’

Several dangerous seconds of silence as they exchanged stares, Justin, between them, glancing from one to the other.

‘You said you’d come –’

‘But I don’t
have
to. I choose to.’

These little, strained exchanges were becoming drearily commonplace. But better they squabble over Cleo’s social life than Gav should read the real text message:
U
 
look delicious
 
2night. Reminds me of the taste of u. J.
Obviously, whatever game she tried to play, he could play harder.